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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.

    E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …

    I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.



  • Well. When I copy and paste source code into my program and compile it it also doesn’t retain the actual code. It’s still not allowed.

    If I on the other hand read source code, remember and reapply it in a sort of similar way later on then that’s totally fine. But that’s not what OpenAI did there. There wasn’t a human involved that read the articles and then used that knowledge to adjust the LLM.

    There question i would have is where is the line there? Does that mean that as soon as there is some automated process that uses the data it’s fine?

    E.g. could I have a script that reads all NYT articles, extracts interesting information and provides them in a different format to users?



  • Might be a fundamental difference in opinion. I don’t see us anywhere near anything related to artificial life.

    What they’ve built there is a product, a computer program and they used other folks data to build it without getting their permission. I also cannot go and just copy and paste source code from all over the internet to build my program. There are licenses attached to it that determine what you can or can’t do with it.

    I feel like just because the term “learning” is involved people no longer view it as simply building or programming a system. Which it is.










  • I don’t see those as alternatives. Skype was always really buggy, sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. Didn’t have great cross platform support and wasn’t suited for meetings without 500 - 1000 people. I used it in the past and it was always a huge pain to deal with.

    Hangouts is nice for 1:1 chats, but it feels lacking. Last time I tried to have a screen share in a separate window it already failed to do so.

    Discord isn’t really an enterprise tool.

    Like… I don’t really want to defend Zoom, but the one thing they do just works.


  • What were the alternatives? One thing I can say about zoom is that it’s easy to use, barely ever has any issues and handles a huge number of participants without a sweat.

    I recall having used MS Teams before. But it often wouldn’t work, had server issues and couldn’t handle large audiences well.